"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

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Monday, August 25, 2008

Devalued Currency

BURBANK, California (Reuters) - John McCain, who often invokes his ordeal as a Vietnam war prisoner to show his devotion to his country as he runs for U.S. president, drew on the experience again on Monday -- this time to deflect sniping over the number of houses he owns.

....

In an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, McCain, 71, said his priority was to keep Americans in their homes in tough economic times.

Then he recalled his Vietnam experience.

"I spent 5 1/2 years in a prison cell without -- I didn't have a house. I didn't have a kitchen table. I didn't have a table. I didn't have a chair," he said.

Sigh. It's practically a drinking game at this point.

"Senator, what do you think the weather will be like tomorrow?" "My friend, when I spent a half-decade in Charlie's clutches, no weather at all could seep through that jungle canopy. Except rain....lots and lots of fucking rain."

"Senator, do you have change for a twenty?" "You know, I spent 5½ years without any money at all, wishing that I could break a twenty for my fellow Americans. We used cigarette butts and pictures of each others' girlfriends as currency. When the photos rotted away, we had memories of the USO girls that would come to the base and blow the officers. You can't make change of memories like that."

"Hello, Senator." "Listen, you smart-mouthed punk, for five years no one said 'hello' to me. It was all 'dinky dao' this and 'you no sit' that. Five fucking years and I still couldn't make head or tail of Charles' crazy moon-man language."

Look, here's the thing, and I'm loath to even bring it up and offer any insight as to what they're doing to themselves. (Yes, as if they're going to read this.) But this is the same thing that plagued Giuliani in the final stages of his campaign: the chronic overuse of "9/11" just dulled its edge after a while.

Even that wouldn't have killed Rudy's shot in and of itself, but once people started ignoring his rhythmic invocations of That Day, they realized that that was it, it was all he had. Giuliani has no intrinsic policy knowledge, either foreign or domestic. He knows how to sanitize a city by selling out to Disney and letting the cops run wild on even suspected ne'er-do-wells. He knows how to cash in on his circumstantial notoriety by charging people tons of money to watch him masturbate to his own leadership skills at a podium. He knows how to reward brainless, thuggish flunkies. He knows how to have the taxpayers bankroll his booty calls. Awesome.

Same thing with McCain. He just showed the world how tremendously overrated his foreign policy acumen really is, a couple weeks ago with the Georgia debacle. His campaign is run by the same asshole lobbyists he rails against, one of whom happened to work for the Georgian government, and may have encouraged Saakashvili to instigate this mess. And when the Russians strike back, as Russians are wont to do, McCain immediately goes into bluster mode, before almost as instantaneously dialing it back down to a peep. His economic policies are even more abusive and incomprehensible, encouraging working-class people to bootstrap their own whiny asses on lower real wages, while the top 1% get handed even more tax cuts.

I defy any potential McCain voter to explain what McCain's own proposals are, foreign and domestic. They can't because he has none, and like Giuliani, as he fritters away the good will his undeniably honorable sacrifices had bought him, uses it like some chit to trump the cheapest, most inconsequential gaffes, McCain exposes his paucity of actual ideas. There's nothing there that either translates coherently, or differentiates him substantially from the current regime.

The war hero thing only gets you so far. McCain's made more out of it because, since more Democrats actually served in the military, they're more reluctant to be disrespectful. You'll never see some goony cunt with a purple band-aid on her chin making fun of John McCain, not at the Democratic convention or any other sanctioned event. Never gonna happen.

But that's never stopped Republicans. Ask Max Cleland what kind of treatment his service got him. Ask John Kerry, or George McGovern. But it only plays so far, and only against an opponent that cuts you slack, and after what will probably be an entire convention week of soaking in it and ladling out the kool-aid to the draft-dodgers that run McCain's party, they're probably going to hit a wall. And since there's nothing else, they'll become even more desperate.

I'm almost surprised one of McCain's Rovian surrogates hasn't gone that extra mile and push-polled some 'tards in South Carolina about Barack Obama's black (or better yet, white) love child. Still a couple months to go.